Goldsmith’s English Malady

I

In his account of predominantly Scottish eighteenth-century émigrés, Robert Crawford uncovers a fractured “English” identity, curiously amenable to British influences, while at the same time never completely assimilating them. Tolerance of all non-provincial accents or traditions gave the impression of a permeability that was far from universal (see Robert Crawford 45–110). This symbiotic relationship bears upon the oppositional minorities with especial force, causing them often, as Terry Eagleton has recognized, to “move under the sign of irony, knowing themselves ineluctably parasitic on their antagonists,” a realization felt with differing stresses and foci by Irish visitors such as Swift, Congreve, Burke, and Berkeley as well as Goldsmith (7). For the latter, the culture clash was jarring, as Edmond Malone described: when Goldsmith arrived in London in 1756 as an “entire stranger” to pursue a career as an apothecary’s assistant, “his broad Irish accent, and the uncouthness of his appearance” met with initial refusal (Poems and Plays v).¹ If he temporarily forgot his roots, it was inevitable that there would be someone by to remind him.

Goldsmith has been, on the other hand, a character that the Irish are apt to distrust. Yeats caught this mood of liminality in “The Seven Sages”:

Oliver Goldsmith sang what he had seen, Roads full of beggars, cattle in the fields, But never saw the trefoil stained with blood, The avenging leaf those fields raised up against it.

(lines 17–20)²

This line of argument spies the pastoral and elegiac, the pity rather than the outrage. When the “rural virtues leave the land” in “The Deserted Village,” it may refer to Lissoy from his native childhood, but, then, why did he preface his survey with a digression on “a time … ere England’s griefs began”? (398, 57). What is certainly suspect is that the Goldsmith who reported back home in the early years might be directly confessional; the letter to his brother, the Rev. Henry Goldsmith (January 1759), is only a startling variation on a common theme, where he traces in himself, a “settled melancholy and an utter disgust of all that life brings with it. Whence the romantic turn that all our family are possessed with, whence this love for every place and every country but that in which we reside?” (Collected Letters 58). For himself the result was a “hesitating disagreeable manner of speaking” (58). This provokes a significant crux for the biographer, for how might we discern the genuine cry of pain from the staged melancholia? Or the canny manipulation of convention from the true confession? A third alternative is always available: that Goldsmith found that conventions were expressive opportunities, not obstacles.

Eagleton’s view sets an agenda that could apply to many exiles at this time, but it bears upon Goldsmith most significantly. The same letter to his brother quoted above introduces linked but still distinct personae in addition to the confirmed depressive: the man of the world, the unbookish savant, and the unwisely generous benefactor (“In general [says Goldsmith] take the word of a man who has seen the world, and studied human nature more by experience than precept, take my word for it I say that books teach us very little of the world”), plus the philosopher rendered by his reliance on learning as vulnerable to “cunning” and ridicule, especially as regards misplaced charity (Collected Letters 60–61). The decision to assimilate or not—or the degree of such negotiation—faces all exiles, yet the evidence of these early letters is not as revealing as it seems. Ralph M. Wardle’s survey of them leads to a view that is shared by other biographers: “Goldsmith’s character does not appear to its best advantage in these letters: his shifts from extravagant flattery to the business at hand, from joviality to grief, sometimes ring false and leave one questioning the man’s sincerity” (85).³ Indeed, Leigh Hunt’s verdict on his excellence as an artist perhaps affects his standing as a biographical subject: “Goldsmith was attached to fictitious sorrows” (314). One is left with the begged question as to what a “sincere...